davidmwilliams writes "Microsoft followed their major annual Tech-Ed event in Australia with a week-long programming contest called 'DevSta,' to find 'star developers.' While the quantity and quality of submissions suggest a poor turnout, it certainly caught the attention of at least two hackers who left their mark. Here is the low-down on the contest, what happened, by whom, and screen shots for posterity in case it's been fixed by the time you read this. And unless the volume of submissions increase dramatically within the next few hours, someone may be awarded an Xbox for doing nothing more than rewriting the Windows calculator as a .NET app."

Next Generation reports on comments by Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime, stating that the Wii will be profitable out of the gate. It's been well-publicized that the consoles offered by Sony and Microsoft are subsidized by those companies. From the article: "Nintendo, however, has traditionally avoided the 'razor and blades' business model by selling its consoles above what they cost to make. Fils-Aime confirmed to Reuters that the Wii would carry on the tradition. 'We will make a profit on the entire Wii proposition out of the box -- hardware and software,' he said. 'That really is a very different philosophy versus our competitors. We are a company that competes only in the interactive entertainment space so we have to make a profit on every thing we do.'" The comment is undoubtedly meant to assuage analysts nervous about the relatively late release date and somewhat higher than expected price for the Wii.

Gamasutra reports that the DS is officially the fastest selling console in Japan. The console has taken just twenty months to sell 10 Million units. From the article: "As noted in the report translated by consumer website GameSpot, the Nintendo DS has been credited with reversing the shrinking Japanese games market, with Nintendo DS software and hardware dominating sales charts for at least the last twelve months. With a population of around 128 million, these latest results show that nearly 8 percent of Japanese consumers now own the console." Update: 08/02 21:20 GMT by Z : Fixed reversed month/unit numbers. Sorry, apparently lisdexic today.

TubHarsh writes "The New York Times reports that Google continues to expand its scope from search engine to inventor. Google assembles the majority of the hardware it uses and deploys at such a large scale, that Google may be 'the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.'. The article also states that Google may be entering the chip design market with new employees who were ex-Alpha Chip engineers."

Chardish writes "In an attempt to explain his reasons for voting against a Net Neutrality bill this past Thursday, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens delivered a jaw-dropping attempt to explain how the Internet works. Said Stevens: 'They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.'"

Datagod asks: "Has anyone ever calculated the temperature you would need to be able to slice through steel like it was thin air? How hot would a light saber really need to be? Also, I am assuming that at least some of the metal would be vaporized and the expanding gas would fling bits of molten metal at the saber wielder. Wouldn't your average Jedi be horribly scarred from all this."